Friday, February 20, 2009

Tonight, I've been taking a few steps towards building a new web site. Blogs are passé; it's now all about Facebook and Twitter. But the easiest way to create a web presence is still to start a blog. So I've been looking at 3 contenders: Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad. I've been attracted to WordPress, and TypePad because I know Blogger. This very blog is on Blogger, which means that I am well aware of its shortcomings. So let's start with WordPress and TypePad.

WordPress

WordPress feels like a more modern, more powerful version of Blogger. They can host your blog for free, and you pay $15/year to have your own domain, and another $15/year if you want to fully control the CSS on your blog. All this is very reasonable, but their interface confused the heck out of me. The look and feel is polished, but I just couldn't find how to do some basic things like adding and removing sidebars. I felt like the WordPress interface was the headlight, and I was the deer. Not good. Some will tell me I should have been more patient. Maybe; but the evening was short, and I said: next!

TypePad

I heard a lot of good things about TypePad, and so thought it would be an easy choice. As I started exploring TypePad, their pricing page stopped me in my endeavor. The most affordable plan that allows you to use your own domain costs $9/month, but it doesn't allow you to setup multiple authors, and you can't fully control the page layout. The next level which has those features is at $15/month, or $180/year. That is 6 times more expensive than WordPress, and 18 times more expensive than Blogger (more on Blogger below). All in all we're still talking about just $180/year. If you're building a professional web site, this most likely won't stop you. If you're not, then you might be wondering if it is really worth paying 6 to 18 times more for TypePad. I didn't wonder for too long, and got back to Blogger.

Blogger

Blogger has many shortfall, but it is huge. It feels like everyone, their mother, and their dog is using TypePad. This means that some shortcomings have been solved by that large community. Consider templates: the standard Blogger templates are either ugly, or tired, or both. But you can find hundreds of free templates out there. Blogger asks $10 to use your own domain, which is as reasonable as it gets. And this is all they ask. Once more, it looks like I'll be using Blogger.

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About

Co-founder of Orbeon, developing Orbeon Forms: web forms, open source, for the enterprise. Passionate about technology, and how it improves the world.

Orbeon

At Orbeon, we want to make complex forms easier to create and easier to use. We believe in web technologies, in standards, in open source, and in great customer support. Our product, Orbeon Forms, is open source, implements XForms (a W3C standard), enables you to create forms that can be used on all mainstream browsers. We develop and provide professional support for Orbeon Forms.

Books

Professional XML
A bible of XML, which covers some of the most important XML-related technologies, including XSLT, XPath, XML Schema, Relax NG, XSL-FO, XHTML, XQuery, Ajax, RSS, Atom, Web services, and many others.

Professional Web 2.0 Programming
You will find here an overview of the technologies that make Web 2.0 such a powerful platform, including XHTML, JavaScript, Ajax, HTTP.